We just got our first glimpse of what Elon Musk's AI company is working on

Tesla CEO Elon Musk announced OpenAI, a non-profit artificial
intelligence research company, way back in December.

We're just now seeing the results of it.

The company released the beta of OpenAI Gym, a toolkit for
comparing reinforcement learning algorithms, Wednesday.

The toolkit allows researchers to test their algorithms by having
them play games, control a robot simulation, or complete tasks,
OpenAI said in its blog post.

Researchers have been using games to test the strength of their
AI for years. We saw that in 1996 when IBM's Deep Blue
computer beat world chess champion Garry Kasparov.
More recently, Google's AlphaGo beat a world champion
at the ancient game of Go for the very first time — something
many AI experts, as well as Musk, thought was a decade away from being
possible.

Researchers can use the OpenAI Gym to have their AI play games
like Atari or Go, control two-dimensional and three-dimensional
robot simulations, complete small tasks, and perform
computations. The platform will allow researchers to compare
their results and work with others.

OpenAI's co-founder and CTO Greg Brockman told Tech Insider
earlier this month that the company is working on two types
of AI: reinforcement learning (when machines learn to
conquer tasks through repeated trial and error) and unsupervised
learning (teaching machines to think like humans).

The OpenAI Gym was initially designed so the company could
test its own algorithms, but it was made open source to help
speed up reinforcement learning research.

Since it was formed, OpenAI has remained committed to making its
projects open source to democratize AI research so everyone can
have a slice of the pie, not just big names like Google and
Facebook. Open sourcing the projects also allows OpenAI to stick
to its mission of advancing "digital intelligence in the way that
is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole."

"It’s about first saying these systems are becoming capable and a
part of our life and we should be thinking about this," he said.
"And there’s not much that can be done to think of safety
standards for tech doesn't exist yet, but acknowledging that this
is going to become important."